Take control of Fear

You are walking down a dark alley late at night when you hear footsteps behind you.  You take a quick look around and see a powerfully built stranger swathed in a large black coat gaining on you with long strides.  His face is partially hidden in the shadows.

You quicken your pace.  But so, it seems, does he.

Now you start to feel very apprehensive, you wonder why you are walking down a dark, deserted alley late at night.  The alternative route is better lit and more frequently used.

Thoughts run swiftly through your mind as you briefly debate the possible scenarios. “I was stupid.  How far is the other end of the alley? … If I started running now would I make it? ….. Suppose I started yelling?   That’s stupid….. He’s just someone walking down the alley going home like me … Then why is he speeding up when I do?

You cross the road

So does he.

Then you run.[1]

This story is an example of a real fear and most people can associate pretty quickly with what something like this feels like.  But for a lot of people this type of dialogue, and the fear response that goes with it, is not just restricted to a fear of powerfully build strangers on a dark night.  There are so many people that suffer some anxiety, apprehension or outright terror when they are riding their horses.  If one of those people is you, don’t despair, there are practical things you can do to help yourself control fear and ensure that you are on control of it rather than the other way around.

The purpose of this blog is to jot down some notes about how fear works, the physiological responses that it triggers in the body and, most importantly, what you can do about it so that you can start to feel better when you are with your horse.

At the outset its important to distinguish between real and unreal fears.  Real fear comes from an immediate danger in the present, we have a rapid response system designed to keep us safe by responding immediately to what’s happening and learning from the situation.  For example, imagine that you are walking along in the country, thinking about nothing in particular.  Dusk is falling and you almost stumble into a deep pit.  You pull back just in time, jolted back to the present moment, your heart thumping.  It all happens in half a second.  This is an example of real fear and the rapid response that you body automatically makes (pulling back just in time).  There is nothing at all wrong with our response to real fears, we need it and it keeps us safe.

The problem for riders is all about unreal fears.  An unreal fear is where we create the fearful situation in our imagination, its not something that is actually happening in real time.  What you are imagining might be something that did actually happen once in the past or it may never have taken place outside of your own mind.  You might think that you are keeping yourself safe by anticipating problems that might arise when you are riding.  While safely is paramount when we are around horses, anticipating potential problems is not the best way to avoid them.  Often by thinking hard about something and ‘putting energy’ into that thought it is more likely that the feared thing will actually happen for real.  Horses also pick up on our mental state because of the impact it has on our breathing and heart rate (as well as other changes) and are more likely to take over and respond unpredictably if we have disappeared into an unreal fear inside our mind.

Unreal fears paralyze us because as far as our mind and body are concerned we don’t know the difference between a vividly imagined internal image and reality.  As far as your brain is concerned the very thing you are fearing is actually happening already.  Your physiological response to unreal fear is exactly the same as to real fear.  The problem is that unreal fear goes on for longer as nothing ever actually happens for the body to respond to because there isn’t a real problem (until your horse picks up on the way you are feeling!).

But don’t despair, if you understand how unreal fear works it is relatively simple to make some changes to the pattern.   Unreal fear is based on a learned reaction to certain triggers, if you can take responsibility to changing those responses then you are going to feel much better pretty quickly.

Its worth having a basic understanding of the physiology of fear. When we suddenly stop ourselves falling into the deep pit in the example above the fear response is activated.  The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is in charge of this and the sympathetic branch of the ANS triggers our flight or fight response.  The body is prepared for immediate action by releasing noradrenalin to activate our body organs. Heart rate, blood pressure and respiration rate are all increased.  Adrenaline is released which has a widespread effect on the body such as boosting the supply of oxygen and glucose to the brain and muscles and stopping non-essential processes such as digestion.  Adrenaline is released from the adrenal gland, located just above the kidneys, which is why you get sensations in that area when you are frightened.  This system triggers quickly but is designed to go back to normal quickly as well once the dangerous situation has passed.

As well as the ANS we have a second system designed to cope with long-term stresses and fears.  The hypothalamus in the brain is activated which triggers a chain of responses that leads to the production of cortisol.  The crux of the problem with unreal fears is that they are, well, unreal and imagined.  So, as far as our body is concerned, they don’t go away until we stop imagining them, its not like the pit in our example where we either fall in or we don’t in a split second.  So if we start imagining the worst case scenario when we arrive at the yard and continue with this all the way through our chores and then our preparations for riding and then all the way through our ride, this is a long enough period of time over which the body will release a cocktail of hormones into the bloodstream, including cortisol. 

Cortisol is responsible for giving the body a quick burst of energy by increasing blood sugar and lowering sensitivity to pain, the significant downside of cortisol is that is lowers the body’s level of immunity, raises blood pressure and impairs cognitive performance.  The other problem is that cortisol takes a long time to leave the system once it has been produced. 

So enough anatomy, what simple and practical steps can we take to help ourselves to control an overactive imagination that’s busy thinking up disaster scenarios?

What are your the triggers?

The first step to controlling your unreal fear, rather than letting it control you, is to start to observe what initially triggers your fear response.  Unreal fear is generally a learnt behaviour and all learnt behaviours have a stimulus, or trigger, which tells us to start doing that behaviour.  That applies even though the fear response comes from an imagined image or scenario playing inside our head.  What starts that dread and foreboding and imagination running away with you?  Lets take an example.  Now, I really don’t like flying very much and that’s been a great test bed for me to understand more about my own fears and to help other people work with theirs.  What is the trigger for me to start my fear response?  It could be any number of things, packing my bag, arriving at the airport, getting on the plane, taking off or turbulence while flying.  But none of those things are triggers for me.  The thing that really gets me is a change in engine pitch, that’s my trigger.   As soon as there is an unexpected change in engine pitch my heart is racing in a millisecond and my breathing changes, and, now I am looking for it, I am aware of the vivid, moving, colour picture inside my head of a specific disaster situation.   Note that this is the trigger for me, if I spoke to another person who has a fear of flying we would almost certainly have different triggers for the fear response.  There may also be more than one trigger.

Now I know what the trigger is I can be ready to consciously keep breathing deeply and to change the image inside my head so that I can reduce or stop completely the fear response to an unreal fear.

As a first step its really worth taking a good hard look at the precise triggers that start your fear response.

Be in control of your imagination, not the other way around!

Whether you are aware of it or not, once the trigger has been activated you create an image or images inside your head that make your mind and body think that the fear is real and present right now.  Your physiology does not know the difference between a real problem in the outside world and one vividly imagined inside your own head. 

If you can start to control the images inside your head you really can make a huge difference to your fears.  Psychologists have discovered that our internal images give instructions to the brain as part of our cognitive processes. For most people this is going on without any conscious awareness but once you get wise to what’s happening you can learn to have full control over the images.

As a rule of thumb, most people are very motivated to act on internal images that are big, bright, colour, moving (like a movie) and seem as if they are located in front of our eyes and quite close to us (its hard to describe that as the image is inside our head but if you imagine a beautiful scene of a situation you really enjoy you will get a sense of where that image is in relation to you).   These are generalizations and not true for everyone but they are a good starting point.  Be aware that there are quite a few people that can’t see their internal images or they can only see them very briefly.  If you are one of those people, don’t worry.  Leave this section and move on, there are ways to change the way you are imagining your fears but that is beyond the scope of this blog.

In contrast, the brain is not going to pay too much attention to an image that is small, unfocused, black and white, still and low down in relation to us. 

So, guess what the attributes are of an internal image that is creating an unreal fear?  Yes, big, bright, colour, moving and usually very close to us.  Those need to change! 

You can play around with these images by choosing a food that you really like but perhaps it would be healthy to eat a little less, be careful what you choose as just this simple exercise might change the way you feel about the food.  Imagine the food in your mind’s eye and observe where it is, what is the image like?  Most likely, its colour and big and bright.  Where is that picture located?

Have some fun with changing the attributes of the picture.  Can you move it so that it is close to the ground and maybe to one side of you if it was previously in front of you.  Can you reduce the size, how small can you make it, can you push it further away from you?  Can you change it to black and white?  If it was a moving image can you turn it into a photo?  Have a play with these ideas and see if you feel any differently about the image as you change its attributes.

It takes some practice to get good at this but once you have the hang of it you have all the tools you need to start to take the power out of the image that is creating your fear.  A small, black and white, still image, close to the ground and the size of a tiny dot does not have the power to create a huge, great big fear response.

Learn to disassociate to reduce the emotion

When we create a picture in our mind’s eye we can do that in one of two ways, either we are viewing the picture as if it was through our own eyes or we see ourselves in the picture as if it was another person looking on.  When we see things as if we are looking through our own eyes, that is called associated and if we can see ourselves, as if through another’s eyes, that is called disassociated. 

Another useful exercise is to learn to manipulate an image inside our head so that we can either see it as associated or disassociated.  It is most common for people to create powerful, fear creating images that are associated.  This is usually more frightening as it is clear to the mind that its ‘me’ that is in this bad situation.  The emotion connected to a disassociated image is just not as powerful.  If you can learn to disassociate this is a great tool to reduce the emotion connected to a particular image and to put you back in control.  You are learning to view things as if you are an onlooker to the situation.

State management

State management is NLP/coaching talk to describe our ability to influence our mood and state of mind.  You may have noticed that some days, when everything is going well and you are having a really good day, you are not troubled by fear when you are riding, while other days are awful and you feel anxious about everything.  On the good days, when you are in a really good “state” you are almost certainly more positive and there is little space for your imagination to get to work planning negative outcomes.  On the bad days the opposite is true.  Learning to manage our state is a very important skill so that we know how to navigate from a negative frame of mind to a good state where we function at our best.  A huge part of this involves us taking responsibility for the way that we feel, if we are a victim at the mercy of what life throws at us then we are not in good shape to get ourselves to a positive frame of mind.  Even if we are not in control of everything that goes on around us we can be in control of the way we feel about it.

Practice your breathing

The physiological response to fear is an automatic, innate response but we do have some power to override it and return the body back to normal as fast as possible.  The most powerful tool that you have is conscious control of your breathing.  If you practice some of the breathing exercises in my previous blog called “A survival breath or a thriving breath” this will be a very big help in a fearful situation, unreal or real.

Learn to be in the present

One of the most powerful ways to control problems with fear and anxiety in riding is to live more in the present moment.  I have got to be honest, this will fundamentally change the response to fear and anxiety but takes a lot of commitment, work and awareness.

Its probably clear by now that an unreal fear comes from our imagination.  The imagination is not based in the present moment because it is not a real situation but anxiety about something that might happen in the future, it has not happened and is not happening NOW. 

It you want to learn more about living in the present get one of Eckhart Tolle’s books, I would highly recommend the Power of Now. 

[1] Story adapted from Free Yourself from Fears by Joseph O’Connor

A survival breath or a thriving breath?

One time I asked Mark Rashid why it is that he very rarely talks to riders about their riding position.  His reply really got me thinking; he said that 90% of the issues of position and alignment are fixed by getting the person to breathe properly.

Could it really be that simple?

And there is even more to breathing as well...  When people (and animals) get frightened they breathe more quickly and more shallowly than when they are relaxed.  Horses can detect this a mile off, I’d argue that they know exactly when we are frightened by changes in our breathing patterns (and from other physiological changes that take place when we’re anxious).  They are programmed to be sensitive to things like that as they are prey animals.   But to add another challenge, people don’t just breathe poorly when concerned about something, it gets to be a habit and a huge percentage of us don’t breathe very well at any time, even when we are relaxed. 

You could think of this shallow breath as a “survival breath”.  It gets enough air into the body so that we don’t keel over but not enough to thrive in what we’re doing. Its hard to ever really be relaxed when survival breathing is the norm.  We get into bad habits when we are children and learn, develop and practice poor breathing patters as the result of copying parents or peers or as a response to stress or physical discomfort.  I asked my chiropractor, a specialist in working with babies and children, when the little ones stop breathing deeply and switch to a survival breath.  He said it started at the age of 2.  So some of us have been practicing for a little while!

 

Breathing and anatomy

The muscle groups that we need to use to breathe can be split into two; first of all the primary muscles of which the most important is the diaphragm and then the secondary muscles, which are located in the upper chest and neck, which are designed to be called into service in times of stress.  They are strong and adaptive but only designed to be used for the short term.  The problem is that due to our lifestyle, and factors discussed above, we tend to get into a habit of overusing the secondary respiration muscles (chest and shoulders) and under using the primary respiration muscles (diaphragm). 

The balance between these muscle groups should be such that 80% of the work is done by the primary muscles and 20% by the secondary muscles. In my experience, the majority of riders are completely reversing this pattern and 80% of the work to breathe is being left to the secondary muscles which are not designed to do this job long term.  If you want to see if you fall into the survival breathing majority then bring your awareness to your shoulders as you breathe in.  If your shoulders move upwards as you take an in breath this is a strong sign that you are overusing your secondary, upper chest muscles for breathing.  Instead your shoulders should move slightly outwards, widening the shoulders as you breathe in.  Other check is to put one hand on your stomach and the other on your upper chest.  Which moves the most?  If you upper hand on your chest is moving the most there is every chance that you are practicing survival breathing.  The stomach should be the place that moves the most, out on an in breath and back in again on an out breath.  Confirmed survival breathers may find that there is very little movement of the stomach during breathing.  Read on to find some exercises to change this pattern for the better!

Its worth getting familiar with the location and size of the parachute shaped muscle that forms the diaphragm.  This should be the star of the show when it comes to breathing.  Its really useful to be able to visualize the diaphragm so that you can have a go at the exercises below.  Note that the diaphragm is not symmetrical, its higher on the right to make room for the liver.  Its attached to each of the lower 6 ribs and to the lumbar spine.  The lower part at the back runs close to the psoas muscle which is one of the most important muscles for riders.  The psoas is the only muscle that attaches to both the spine and the leg, its main function is to flex the hip joint.  Poor breathing adversely affects the way the psoas works which comes right back to Mark’s words about breathing and alignment at the very start of this blog.  Correct breathing also rocks the pelvis slightly with each breath, rotating forward on an inhalation and backwards on an exhalation.  The exhalation straightens the lumbar curve and effectively puts you in a more “collected” position.  I think this is one of the reasons that an out breath serves very nicely as a half halt and helps with all transitions.  Good breathing also creates some motion at the sacroiliac joint (where the pelvis meets the lumbar spine), another critically important joint for riders.

A good breathing habit and full movement of the diaphragm is really important for our overall health.  The downward movement of the diaphragm gives the organs a massage with each breath and the diaphragm is attached to the heart by ligaments so correct breathing is also good for heart function.   Scientists have even proven that cancer is anaerobic and does not survive in high concentrations of oxygen (see www.breathing.com).

Breathing and fear

Fear, anxiety, anger, frustration and other negative emotions tend to cause shallow breathing.  This is part of the natural physiological response.  If we can learn to recognize when we are feeling these sort of negative emotions, and we know how to breathe deeply, then we can consciously calm ourselves down and, at the very least, stay in control of a situation.  While breathing is an unconscious process (we don’t need to think at all about breathing most of the time) it is one that we can consciously override for the better if we choose to.

A horse is very aware when we are not breathing well.  Survival breathing gives him the message that all is not well and we are preparing for some kind of emergency.   As we tighten the secondary respiration muscles to drag air into the body the horse will tighten corresponding muscles and it affects the way horse moves as well as his mental state.  Often times this negative cycle can be reversed simply by the rider remembering to breathe properly!!!

Exercises

If you get at all dizzy during any of these exercises then stop right away. You are getting  more oxygen into your body than its used to and you are perhaps doing too much to start with.

1a) The general principle of breathing practice is that we focus on the out breath and the in breath will take care of itself.  For example practice breathing out through a straw.  Just take a normal breath to start with, no need to take an extra-deep breath before you exhale.  Push the air through the straw until you naturally reach the end of that breath.  Make sure you hold the straw in a relaxed way.  Practice for about 5 minutes and note the difference in your breathing when you have finished.  After a bit of practice with the straw try the same exercise without it, just imagining that you have a straw (from The Breathing Book by Donna Farhi).

1b) As an alternative you can imagine that your out breath creates a thin golden thread that winds and spirals away from you as you breathe out.

2) Lie on your back on the floor and put a book on top of your tummy. When the diaphragm is working properly the book will raise up with your in breath and down again as you breathe out.  Check that you are not using your stomach muscles to deliberately move the book, it will move naturally as you breath deeply.

3a) Imagine the diaphragm moving up on an inhalation and down on an exhalation.  The motion is going to be in line with your central axis.

3b) Imagine that the diaphragm as a lift (elevator) moving up and down in its shaft (your ribs).  As you inhale the lift goes down and as you exhale it moves up.

3c) Imagine the diaphragm to be a parachute.  As you inhale the centre of the parachute drops downwards, the sides billow and the strings loosen. As you exhale the parachute expands its dome upwards and the strings become taught again.  (3a to c from Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery by Eric Franklin)

3d) Visualize that you are breathing to a point below your belt line, this helps the diaphragm to descend.  (From Centered Riding by Sally Swift)

4) You can see in the diagram above that the diaphragm extends downwards at the back in two “cords”.  These are called crura and these attach to the lumbar spine. Imagine these two crura reach all the way to your tailbone.  Visualize someone pulling these cords as you inhale and releasing them as you exhale. (from Dynamic Alignment through imagery by Eric Franklin)

5) Try feeling that the air is going through a big, flexible tube, right the way down through the center of your body all the way to your feet.  It helps to imagine this tube any colour or texture that appeals to you. (From Centered Riding by Sally Swift)

6) When you are frightened or anxious you can imagine breathing in something that will give you the courage or relaxation that you need right now. You could imagine anything you like that might help the situation, whatever is right for you. The idea is to breathe in lots and lots of tiny versions of this object so that in every breath you will take many of them into your lungs and then breathe them out again.  It sounds a bit odd but can be an extremely effective technique. (from Denise McCluggage The Centered Skier)

7) Riding in walk, count how many strides your horse takes on one of your out breaths and one of your in breaths.  If its easier you can just count the number of times front legs move.  Are you able to lengthen the out breath and stay comfortable? What impact does this have on the way your horse is going? (Riding exercise from Mark Rashid)

You will find many, many more exercises in The Breathing Book by Donna Farhi which is a must for every breathing enthusiast!

If during any of these exercises you find that either the in breath or out breath feels a bit uncomfortable or “stuck” don’t panic! Sometimes people find that they can release the out breath but the in breath still feels like it is restricted in some way.  I think this is because the trachea in the upper chest, which leads air to the lungs, gets distorted by muscular tension.  That makes the in breath uncomfortable and often people describe some kind of stuck feeling or blockage in the upper chest.  This is the type of thing that we can resolve easily in lessons and clinics using visualization and NLP techniques.

 

 

Inspiring words

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking.  Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice.  And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuitions.  They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary....

You've got to find what you love.... The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.  And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.  If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.  Don't settle.  As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.  So keep looking until you find it. "

Steve Jobs (founder and CEO of Apple Inc) i

You can see the speech on youtube.com at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM